Review: The Lives of the Poets: Boxed Set

User Review - Richard Epstein - Goodreads

It is not Johnson's fault that I am not included: I came along too late for that. Notwithstanding this unavoidable, but lamentable, omission, this is among the very greatest of biographical works, endlessly entertaining and informed by wisdom.Read full review

Review: The Lives of the Poets: Boxed Set

User Review - Jonathan - Goodreads

The critical gold standard, of course, at the gold standard price of $650. Happily there are cheaper editions.Read full review

Page 52 - To move, but doth if th' other do. And though it in the centre sit, Yet, when the other far doth roam, It leans and hearkens after it, And grows erect as that comes home. Such wilt thou be to me, who must Like th

Page 246 - Lost' has this inconvenience, that it comprises neither human actions nor human manners. The man and woman who act and suffer are in a state which no other man or woman can ever know. The reader finds no transaction in which he can be engaged ; beholds no condition in which he can by any effort of imagination place himself; he has, therefore, little natural curiosity or sympathy.

Page 251 - The confusion of spirit and matter, which pervades the whole narration of the war of Heaven, fills it with incongruity; and the book in which it is related is, I believe, the favourite of children, and gradually neglected as knowledge is increased.

Page 82 - Wash'd from the morning beauties' deepest red ; An harmless flatt'ring meteor shone for hair, And fell adown his shoulders with loose care ; He cuts out a silk mantle from the skies, Where the most sprightly azure...

Page 28 - Nor was the sublime more within their reach than the pathetic; for they never attempted that comprehension and expanse of thought which at once fills the whole mind, and of which the first effect is sudden astonishment, and the second rational admiration.

Page 28 - As they were wholly employed on something unexpected and surprising, they had no regard to that uniformity of sentiment which enables us to conceive and to excite the pains and the pleasure of other minds...

Page 256 - Regained has been too much depreciated, Samson Agonistes has in requital been too much admired. It could only be by long prejudice, and the bigotry of learning, that Milton could prefer the ancient tragedies, with their encumbrance of a chorus, to the exhibitions of the French and English stages...